We are now a week on from the excellent presentations given on photography and Blogging at the Stay Blackpool members day at the New President Hotel.
I suppose the first question asked about blogging is well why do I need one and what can it do for me and now having had a little time over the last week or so I have read up on the subject and feel a little more qualified to expand on the great answer that Jane gave in her presentation.
Networking well what it is exactly? Networking doesn’t happen overnight but it is a gradual process on building up contacts through the blogging experience where you have people read your site content and you read others, it may or maybe not the case that natural business prospects come about as part of this process. Clearly Jane has used her floristry skills business where she caters for weddings and other hi profile events to create content for her site(s) which is both interesting and very readable. She has also mastered the ability to populate content with sufficient relevant pictures to keep the reader visually entertained and ‘glued to the text on the page’.
I mentioned natural business prospects…. I am sure Jane would agree that these do not jump out at you from the page or the contributions made to that page but with a little thought, opportunities may and will indeed arise.
Now to the other important benefit of blogging. There is one big player when it comes to searching the internet and that is Google. Yes of course there are others like Yahoo and Ask Jeeves just to name a few but over 90% of search traffic goes through Google.
SERP, it forms part of the title and I will now tell you what it stands for, Search Engine Results Page. It is the page of results returned by Google or Yahoo for a given search term.
Google ranks where it will put your particular site if it is relevant to the search term on a number of factors some of which they keep very close to their chests. One that is known about is traffic. The more traffic you can direct to your site or blog it stands to reason the further up the results page you will fall. One thing amongst all others stands out in the way Google works this out and it is relevancy. Exactly what does this mean well if I was looking for details on Blackpool Trams I want to read content on Blackpool Trams, but if that was written by an accommodation provider and I was thinking of coming to Blackpool and the article was hosted on a providers site well you can see where this is going!!
We use a tracking script on both our blog and business web site supplied by these people. If you visit the site you will see they offer the code for a free version which can be inserted very easily onto the code of a home page giving visitor statistics. We have a paid subscription which costs 5 Euro’s a month but provides invaluable information on who is landing on our web sites and more importantly the search terms and the referring web sites they use and come from. This alone allows us to target advertising spend and calculate a return on investment from various options.
This particular blog has only been in existence for no more than a month but already it is getting hits from high up on the Google SERPS for such terms as Blackpool Trams and Lioness cubs, even the names of the contractors used in the Tram article are bringing in generic traffic from Google.
Now this may not yet be generating business but the potential is very definitely there for it to do so in the future and don’t forget Google measures the amount of traffic going to your site or blog and even if you are getting hits for what you may see as unimportant search terms such as lioness cubs the potential is there to push you further up the ratings on the more lucrative searches relative to your business.
Clearly there are the key search terms that whatever your line of business you want to score high upon, the trouble is these are often the same terms that have a lot of competition, ‘florist in Blackpool’ for a Company like Jane’s or Hotel or B&B; in Blackpool for an accommodation provider are such examples.
That competition is very fierce and after all there are only 10 spots on the first page of google but it can be overcome the only thing that needs to be invested from those that want to try this are time, relevant and quality content for blogs and the ability to recognise that these things do not happen overnight.
Katie, you are becoming a BLOGGING expert! Everything you are saying is totally correct, and well done on keeping your BLOG up to date and interesting. My BLOG for StayBlackpool is now attracting over 200 hits a day, and this is in a short space of time. I know we probably get more hits quickly as we have a network of members, but stick at it, and you will reap the rewards. I also think Twitter is a really good way to network and exchange information. In fact I am getting quite addicted!!! Have a good weekend.
I am really glad to see that you are putting so much of effort for encouraging the visitors with valueable seo posts like this.